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Building a PPC Campaign: Workflow & Mistakes to Avoid

I haven't done PPC in a long time, so when I had to set something up for my dad's dental continuing education conference and travel business, it took a while to shake off the rust. I'm still figuring things out, but so far I've got some things flowing smoothly, and some mistakes worth learning from, too. So let's see what we can learn from this campaign.

(This was in the context of trying PPC again for my dad's dental CE cruises. I already knew the campaign strategy and so was able to create the landing page quickly, making the wireframe myself, having the graphics fleshed out by Angeles, and the HTML sliced by PSD to HTML CSS.)

If you don't have your strategy set already, you need to think things through first. (For instance, is it going to be an e-commerce or lead gen play? Who's the audience? Search or content network? Etc.) Here are the steps for PPC workflow:

Start by reviewing past campaigns for keyword ideas, impression and click-through rate (CTR) data, as well as ad copy ideas. See what keywords were irrelevant and which worked better. Draw up negative keywords accordingly.

Organize the campaign by keyword theme -- consider the slight nuances in intent between keywords and put yourself in the searcher's shoes. What exactly do they have in mind? Use campaigns liberally as an organizing concept.

For each campaign, jot down specific terms that match those slight nuances to show searchers that you get what they want, exactly.

Create the campaigns in AdWords Editor as per step 2.

Use SEOBook's keyword list generator for quickly building variations and adding the word "Phrase" or "Exact" at the end, so I can easily paste into AdWords Editor and have the match type set up.